Ethan Zuckermann (one of the few people I’m inclined to think of as a “friend” after only one meeting) rattled my world today, without even meaning to. In a post on his weblog, he linked — tangentially, almost irrelevantly — to a lengthy New York Times article about “extraordinary rendition”, which I had never heard of before.
The title of the article pretty much says it all: Outsourcing Torture:
The secret history of America’s “extraordinary rendition” program. According to Wikipedia:
Extraordinary rendition refers to an American extra-judicial procedure… of sending criminal suspects, generally suspected terrorists or supporters of terrorist organisations, to countries other than the United States for imprisonment and interrogation.
Typically, the CIA abducts a suspect in a foreign country and whisks him off to a US ally whose intelligence agency is known to employ means of persuasion that US law prohibits the CIA from practicing. That is, torture: brutal, barbaric, revolting physical and psychological torture. Suspects so abducted often stay “disappeared” for months or years. Some are eventually released without charges. Some wind up at Gitmo. Some never resurface.
As I understand it — and I leave open the possibility that I have been misled by inaccurate or incomplete reporting — the US Government does not deny the practice of extraordinary rendition. Rather, its defense of the practice seems to have two components. One is a rather flimsy-sounding legal argument that (a) the intent of delivering suspects to unsavory allies is not to obtain information through torture, but rather via more culturally-informed, native-language interrogators; and (b) the practice only violates international law (specifically the UN Convention Against Torture, Article 3) if US operatives believe it “more likely than not” that torture will result. Which, we’re told, they don’t.
The other component of the defense is the emotional one: an assertion that “we have to take the gloves off” in the war against terror. In other words, America’s agents don’t have time for slow, psychological, rights-respecting interrogation tactics. In the race to discover and disrupt terror attacks before more (American) lives are lost, some moral scruples must be sacrificed.
It is this latter argument that deeply, deeply disturbs me. It’s taken me the better part of a day, and a couple of hours arguing with a friend, to articulate why.
I supported the invasion/liberation of Iraq, and I continue to. Why? Not because of the danger of weapons of mass destruction, nor the potential for an Iraq-al Qaeda link. Rather, for the sake of the Iraqi people, especially the poor much-abused Kurds. I think of myself as a “benevolent interventionist”: I believe the US, the UN, the EU, and other powerful nations have an obligation (not a right) to intervene elsewhere in the world to prevent groups weaker than us from brutalizing groups even weaker than themselves. To put it metaphorically: if I’m walking behind a school and encounter a 14-year-old beating up an 8-year-old, I have a moral obligation to break it up. Even though they’re not my kids.
Maybe I’ll explore that position in a future post, but not here. I’m presenting that now only for context. Questionable US government justifications for the Iraq invasion/liberation didn’t disturb me terribly because I recognize that many Americans are “selfish interventionists”: they only think the US should spend its resources and the lives of its soldiers to protect itself. I figured US leaders were trying to do the right thing from a “rescue the downtrodden and spread democracy and freedom to the world” perspective, and were just being expedient about motivating the American electorate to go along. Less than saintly, perhaps, but not exactly evil either.
Accusations about Halliburton notwithstanding, I’m still inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt and think that most (if not all) of our elected and appointed leaders are trying — with varying degrees of clarity and competence — to do the right thing, at least as they see it, within the constraints of a ravenously unforgiving political context.
So why does extraordinary rendition shake me so deeply? Because we are in a war — a military, cultural, and intellectual war against fanaticism and contempt for basic human rights — and I suddenly wonder whether my nation’s leaders, my public servants, are on the same side I am.
As I see it, one of the greatest causes of evil and misery in the history of the world is the human tendency to partition people into “us” vs. “them”, the “in group” vs. the “out group”. This tendency will take advantage of any convenient fault line along which to divide: religion, ethnicity, social class, language, sports team, profession, even operating system. (As far as I know, nobody has ever died for Windows. Not so for the others.)
If the US is willing to sacrifice morality… to violate the most basic human rights of unconvicted suspects… to torture in an attempt to head off potential attacks on American citizens, then this is just one more “us vs. them” struggle. It’s not right vs. wrong any more, but just “my thugs are better than your thugs.” We’ve lost the moral high ground.
And I don’t believe a war of values can ever be won that way. The problem, you see, is that even if you eventually do eliminate the enemy, you’ve lost. In the process, you’ve become the enemy.
Disclosure: I’m a Catholic by conversion (formerly an atheist), and I believe we’ve been shown very very pointedly that doing what’s moral and right, without compromise, even if it leads to death, is the only path to victory.
